Quantification of isotope label
Allen DK., Ratcliffe RG.
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009. All rights reserved. The use of stable and radioactive isotopes of low natural abundance has a long history in plant research. At a metabolic level, isotope labeling leads to the discovery of new pathways (e.g., [48, 70]) and to detailed descriptions of the fluxes that underpin the metabolic phenotype [93, 108]. In particular, and as described in detail elsewhere in this book, 13C-labeling experiments provide the inputs for generating the large-scale flux maps that emerge from network flux analysis. The availability of robust, accurate methods for the analysis of the redistribution of label is central to the success of this approach, and so this chapter focuses on the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mass spectrometry (MS) techniques that make this possible.